By Nancy Caouette
MEXICO CITY
Local police in San Fernando were involved in the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants and the slaughter of at least 193 other migrants in 2011, Mexico’s attorney general’s office admitted to an American research group.
The Mexican prosecutor confirmed the findings Dec 10 to the National Security Archive, a Washington-based research organization that solicited the information through Mexican transparency laws.
The information was made public for the first time Monday on the Archive’s website where the attorney general exposed links between police in San Fernando, located in the northern state of Tamaulipas, and the Zetas drug cartel.
According to the information provided by the attorney general’s office, members of the Zetas and police detainees alleged that local police worked as soldiers for the Zeta cartel.
“I know that police and transit officials in San Fernando help the Zetas organization because rather than take detainees to the municipal jail, they would deliver them to the Zetas,” said Alvaro Alba Terrazas, a police officer detained after the San Fernando massacre and cited in the attorney general’s memo.
“(A police officer) named Oscar Jaramillo received money from the organization to collaborate,” he added.
In Tamaulipas, a state that shares a border with Texas, cases of mass abductions of central American migrants made headlines in 2010 and 2011. Since then, dozens of mass graves containing hundreds of corpses have been discovered in Tamaulipas and the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon.
For political scientist Denise Eugenia Dresser Guerra, Mexican police is now a criminal force that no longer protects civilians. “Police officers are now criminal killers with salary and there is no law to correct that. That is why they are now doing what they want,” she told MVS radio.
National Security Archive investigators said that the declassification of documents related to the mass killing of migrants in San Fernando represents a “huge step forward for transparency on human right violations in Mexico.”
The non-profit organization also drew a parallel between the implication of local police in the San Fernando cases and the case of 43 missing students from the college of Ayotzinapa, who disappeared Sept. 26 in Iguala, in the southwestern state of Guerrero.
“Just like the Ayotzinapa case, the massacre of San Fernando is symptomatic of a dirty war of corruption and narco politics, which has consumed areas of Mexico during the last decade,” the group wrote on its website.
The missing students are presumed dead by authorities after three gang members confessed to killing at least 40 of the students. Authorities believe local police kidnapped the students and delivered them to members of the Guerrero Unidos drug cartel who murdered and burned the students.
www.aa.com.tr/en
